Restaurant Guide

Published: 2026-10-30 · Reviewed: 2026-11-04

Managing Food Costs: Templates That Help

Why this matters

In most restaurants, food cost is the difference between a business and a hobby that pays wages. A typical restaurant targets food costs around 28–35% of menu revenue, and every point above that comes straight out of your profit. The painful part: most owners know their food cost is too high but can’t say which dishes, which suppliers, or which habits are causing it. You can’t fix what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure without records. Templates aren’t the glamorous part of running a restaurant, but they are the part that tells you the truth about your money.

Practical steps

1. Cost every dish on the menu

A menu costing sheet breaks each dish into its ingredients, quantities, supplier prices, and total plate cost. This is the foundation of everything else:

  • List every ingredient with its unit cost from your supplier invoices, not the price from six months ago, the price on your last delivery.
  • Include the small stuff: oil, garnish, seasoning, portion of sauce. The garnish you ignore costs more across a hundred covers than the steak you agonise over.
  • Calculate your target selling price from the plate cost. If a dish costs you £4.20 and your target food cost is 30%, it needs to sell for £14. Miss that and you’re subsidising someone’s dinner.
  • Re-cost when prices move. Suppliers put prices up quietly and often. A dish that was profitable in January can be a loss-maker by June if you haven’t updated the numbers.

2. Track waste like it matters, because it does

Waste is the silent half of food cost. Most restaurants throw away 4–10% of purchased food through spoilage, over-preparation, and plate waste, and almost none of them track it:

  • Log what gets thrown away daily: what, how much, and why (spoiled, over-prepped, customer return, dropped). “Why” matters, spoilage means you’re over-ordering, over-prep means your prep sheets are wrong, and customer returns mean the dish or portion is wrong.
  • Review the waste log weekly alongside your sales. If you’re throwing away the same ingredient every week, you’re either over-ordering it or need to redesign a dish around it.
  • Put a value on waste. “We binned 3kg of chicken” is abstract; “we binned £18 of chicken today” changes behaviour in the kitchen overnight.

3. Compare suppliers on price, not habit

Loyalty to a supplier is worth something, reliability, credit terms, quality consistency. But loyalty without price checks is just overpaying:

  • Once a quarter, take your top 15–20 ingredients by spend and get prices from at least one alternative supplier. It takes an hour and routinely finds 5–15% savings on something.
  • Compare like with like, grade, pack size, delivery charges included. A cheaper per-kilo price with a £25 delivery charge and a minimum order you can’t use is not cheaper.
  • Use your delivery records when negotiating. “We’ve had three short deliveries this month” is leverage. “We feel like your service has slipped” is not.

4. Review the numbers monthly

Once a month, sit down with your actuals: total food purchases against food revenue, waste log totals, and any dishes with declining margins. This is a 30-minute meeting with yourself (or your head chef) that prevents the slow bleed. Restaurants that review monthly catch problems in weeks; restaurants that “check the accounts at year end” find problems when it’s too late.

Common mistakes

  1. Costing the menu once and never again. Supplier prices move, portion sizes drift, chefs “improve” recipes with extra ingredients. A costing sheet from opening week is a historical document, not a management tool. Re-cost quarterly at minimum.
  2. Ignoring the cheap ingredients. Nobody re-costs oil, flour, or garnish, and across hundreds of covers these add up to real money. The £0.40 you ignore on every plate is £400 on a thousand covers.
  3. Confusing revenue growth with profitability. A busy restaurant can still lose money on every cover. If food cost is 42% and you sell more, you just lose money faster. Volume fixes nothing without margin.
  4. No waste records. “We don’t waste much” is the sentence every restaurant owner says right before seeing their first waste log. Measure it for a month. You’ll be surprised, and then you’ll fix it.

Templates that help

Bottom line

Food cost management is three habits: cost every dish and keep it current, track waste with pound signs attached, and check supplier prices quarterly. The templates just make the habits stick. Restaurants that do this know their margins to the penny; restaurants that don’t guess, and the guess is always wrong in the supplier’s favour.